
Listening is actually really, really hard.
Even when we’re supposedly listening to others, we’re usually still thinking about ourselves — we’re wondering what we’ll say in response, if our hair is out of place, or if we remembered to call our mother (call her just in case). And though we might be shabby listeners in conversation with others, we’re often worse at listening to ourselves. Our bodies tell us they’re tired, and we insist on watching another episode of Black Bird. We sense we’re tired, but we slurp coffee instead of lying down. We override hunger cues as we strive for impossible beauty ideals. We have gut instincts that sound woo, and so we neglect our intuition.
How do we learn to listen, not only to others, but to ourselves? Anne Lamott writes:
“You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side…when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind…So try to calm down, get quiet, breathe, and listen…Train yourself to hear that small inner voice.”
As I type this note, I am considering the ways in which I fail to listen. To be wholeheartedly and whole-beingly open to input. So I pause. I look inward and ask: what is one thing I feel in my own body and heart right now? Slowly slowly, I’m training myself to hear with more acuity and compassion. I think the most crucial bit in listening is that we must be willing to change based on what we hear, to redirect and act differently than we would have, based on the new information. Otherwise we’re just spinning our wheels. Didier Fassin says of ethnography that it both “illuminates the unknown,” and “interrogates the obvious.” I think that listening is a bit like this too. Below, a few practices for cultivating inner knowing.
Ears to the ground,
Erica
In a treatise on “the revolutionary potential of taking back our attention,” Jenny Odell argues for a politics of refusal. Her book, How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, is a blueprint for a more intentional life that rejects the capitalist definition of productivity. It’s activism masquerading as self-help. “I am less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter,” Odell writes, “than I am in a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again, together?” | California Magazine

What if laughter is the key to listening? “There is hard science behind this. Laughter causes the release of oxytocin—and a decrease in stress hormones. It sparks trust. (Even the expectation of laughter can decrease adrenaline by 70%, researchers have found.) Humor literally is a drug, boosting trust, creativity and flexibility (all of which characterize ‘good conflict’ as opposed to ‘high conflict’).” | Unraveled
Sleep has a lot to teach us about ourselves and others. Rubin Naiman writes: “Mythic perspectives suggest that there is something in the deep waters of sleep worth accessing, and invite us to personally investigate it. Metaphorically, they encourage us to practice our descent into the waters of sleep with our third eye open.”
Mary Richard’s guided Yoga Nidra is just such an invitation into the depths (it’s embedded in Lizzie Lasater’s newsletter which is worth subscribing to and exploring the archives for all things rest). In this session Mary guides us toward a regenerative, all-knowing kind of stillness.

Poetry requires a different kind of listening. In my experience, it requires dropping pre-conceived notions of grammar and language, of temporal reality, and of linear progress. It requires shedding a little bit of me, so as to better live inside the contours, textures, and resonance of the words. My friends Pam Lozoff and Zara Drapkin, both therapists, just released a multimedia zine that expresses the different ways we inhabit a body in pain. It’s lush, scintillating, and makes my whole being want to listen closer. | EARTH/bodies

"Words woven into stories passed on through generations generating new threads — braided here, frayed there spoken through lines in your hands when they meet mine, and laugh lines when a word lands at just the right moment that it stirs from deep in the belly a laugh that rubs balm on the aching Soul, that has born each story passed on, each thread woven into the next, each frayed edge..."