Pause-Relax-Open establish the mind state for being fully present in the mutual, emergent moment. In this vibrating and aware moment, we listen and speak. In this vivid state of mind, we communicate. The Insight Dialogue meditation instructions that directly address this are Listen Deeply-Speak the Truth; we will focus first on Listen Deeply.
Listen Deeply opens the senses, heart, and mind to receive the moment fully. To Listen Deeply is to listen with mindfulness, surrendering fully to the unfolding words and presence of our co-meditators. Grounded in clear awareness and sensitive to the speaker’s offering, we are a receptive field touched by the words, emotions, and energies of our fellow human beings.
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Communication is mutual gift giving. We offer each other the gift of presence, the particular wisdom of the moment, and the muscled and softly textured heart. We receive the spoken word with appreciation for this gift. We listen with the generosity of patience, unhurried by a personal agenda. We aspire to the type of generosity Thoreau suggested when he said: “The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.” With the mind expanded by Open and Trust Emergence, we are touched; tranquil, we do not interrupt our listening with an internal dialogue. For the moment we are not preoccupied about how we might respond to sooth, fix, impress, or dominate. We listen with kindness, compassion, and responsiveness.
As the words of another touch us, the astonishing loop of communicative contact is closed. What began as an emotion or thought in the mind of the speaker has landed in our heart-minds. For the voyage, the speaker’s thought was enclosed in the conditioned craft of language and launched into the world as speech sounds. Our ears were touched in the contact of raw sensation, and our minds, touched in mental contact, interpreted those sounds. Then the associative machinery of a conditioned lifetime took this input and proliferated it into thoughts, emotions, and internal visual images. All of these reactions yield the experience we call understanding, as in “I understand what you said.” But the constructed and subjective nature of that understanding is rarely observed in action, or taken into account in our felt sense of everyday communication.
In meditation, mindfulness reveals this process of mutual contact, and the reactivity that almost always accompanies verbal communication. In Insight Dialogue, we see how compelling we find each other’s stories. We are attracted to the words and the cadence of our companions, as some part of our psyche is filled with the sweetness of apparent contact. We inhabit the story we are being told, internally creating its images and emotions in an effort to understand and empathize. We are taking it as our own.
Listen Deeply has active and perceptive aspects. In active listening, we apply the energy of attention to the many qualities of experience. We seek understanding, absorb detail, and navigate the inlets and bays of the ever-shifting coastline of verbal relating. The receptive aspect of Listen Deeply emphasizes the stability and sensitivity of awareness. There is no reaching out, no going anywhere. We are calm and vigilant. There is no grasping at what is heard.
We shift from focused attention to meanings, emotions, or energetic presence to a wider listening. With this shift, the overall flow and direction of the dialogue become more readily perceived. Rather than attending to individual words, we may allow the river of sound to pour over us, revealing its larger contours. Changes in pitch and loudness may become more musical than linguistic in nature; energetic changes can be seen as changing sensation.
Deep listening meditation teaches us to discern in all sounds the rising and passing of experience; this is wisdom. It also teaches us to discern the pains and joys of our shared human experience; this is compassion. As these different qualities of listening emerge, we meet their emergence with trust.
Listen Deeply rests on personal silent practice. Listening is stillness and the vibrating of that stillness. Receptive listening dissolves selfishness. Its inherent stillness allows the cries of internal self-making to die down. Attention is not gathered around me and my needs. Even so, listening deeply also includes a delicate inward listening that parallels and enables receptive listening to the other. There is no-self that Listens Deeply as the Truth speaks itself.
