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SEVEN LISTENING
PRACTICES
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an
act, but a habit.”
- Aristotle
As we’ve found, listening is a skill, not a natural capability like hearing.
Any skill can be improved – and the first step in that process is to become
conscious that you’re doing it. If you know what you don’t know, you have
a chance to learn it. If you don’t know what you don’t know, there is
nothing you can do.
So, the first step here is to admit this to yourself, using the adverb that’s
most appropriate for you:
“I am sometimes/often/generally unconscious in my
listening.”
In my TED talk on conscious listening I suggested 5 practices to improve
your conscious listening skills. In this Chapter, we not only explore each
of those in detail; we add 2 more, bringing the total to 7.
Conscious listening is really a subset of conscious living – the practice of
being aware and mindful as we move through life. The main secret to
conscious listening (and indeed to conscious living) lies in
intention
.
Simply by recognising that you have been unconscious in your listening
and setting the intention to become fully conscious, you open the door to
a wonderful new dimension of experience, adding to the richness of your
reality and enhancing your wellbeing, effectiveness and happiness.
These practices will help you on that journey.
1. SILENCE
If you live in a city, as more than half of humanity does now, it’s rare to
experience silence, and perfectly possible to forget that it even exists.
Let’s take a moment to consider silence.
Dame Evelyn Glennie made a superb DVD called
Touch the Sound
, in
which she reflects on silence, listening and music and performs her art,
including a stunning solo snare drum performance in Grand Central
Station’s magnificent hall. (I highly recommend watching this film if you
have any interest in sound.) At one point, she says: “Silence is a sound.” I
totally agree with this, and have experienced different qualities of silence
in my life. Four of them spring to mind.
First, the glorious, expansive silence of a windless day far above the tree-
line in mountains. If you can find a spot isolated from human-generated
noise, there are very few birds at that altitude, and with little or no air
movement you can experience lengthy periods of complete silence – a
silence that seems to go on forever, like the view.
Second, the reverential silence in an empty place of worship. I remember
sitting in Worth Abbey Church in Surrey, England whilst on a retreat
there. The vast upturned dome of the church caps a modern, circular
building that’s partly submerged in the South Downs landscape.
Designed by France Pollen and built-in 1974, it’s a huge space that seats
1,400 people; at night, there is a single spotlight on the altar in the centre.
It was evening, in between monastic offices, and I was the only person in
there. I enjoyed half an hour of silence, punctuated (and paradoxically
emphasised) by one intrusion as a monk entered and left and the door
opening and closing echoed through the huge room. This was a cloaking,
velvety silence that felt peaceful and intimate.
Third, the intimidating silence in a deep cave. I am slightly
claustrophobic, so caving is not high on my list of hobbies. Many years
ago, I visited Kents Cavern in Devon, England, which was inhabited by
Upper Palaeolithic period humans, possibly up to 40,000 years ago. At
one point in the tour, the guide had us sit quietly, and then switched off
the lights. The darkness was absolute, and the silence seemed to press in
and become almost suffocating, the auditory consort to the absolute
darkness that enveloped us. As I sat, I reflected on those early humans
and how their hearing must have been so important: they probably
shared that extensive cavern system with cave bears, lions and hyenas. In
the dark, intense listening would have been an essential, and often life-
saving, skill for those ancient people. It was a relief when the lights went
back on and we started to make sound ourselves, happy to be back in the
20th century after that brief, primal experience.
Finally, the sterile silence of the desert. With no fauna at all, the silence of
a windless day in the desert speaks of the stillness of death, emphasising
the hostile and inhospitable environment and reminding one of the
inevitable outcome of being in that place for too long without the
specialist skills and equipment needed to survive. I have experienced this
in Dubai, far from the slick intensity of the city. Intractable and
uncompromising, it felt as though the desert’s silence signalled nothing
less than a haughty indifference to my existence.
Silence is not only a sound: it is the context for all sound. Without the
gaps, words and musical notes would be a meaningless jumble. Losing
contact with this context can result in ever-increasing desensitisation,
evincing itself as a tendency to add inputs or edge the volume up. I see
this more and more in younger people, and I worry for the future as
virtual reality and endless innovations in delivering entertainment create
an addictive relationship to intensity.
Silence is your baseline. Try to stay in conscious contact with it by
emulating recording engineers. These are listening professionals; their
ears are their livelihood. They know they need to take regular breaks,
moving away from the loudspeakers and recalibrating their ears with
some silence, or at the very least some quietness.
In 2015, I was honoured to take part in a brilliant feature film entitled
In
Pursuit of Silence, since
described by
Huffington Post
as “a luminous and
vitally important movie”. Directed by Patrick Shen, the film explores our
relationship with silence and noise, travelling the world from a traditional
tea ceremony in Kyoto, to the streets of the loudest city on the planet,
Mumbai. After the film’s release, I spoke with Patrick about many aspects
of silence; check the panel for an excerpt from the interview and
instructions on accessing the full interview in audio and written form
online.
Our key objective in this first practice is to recalibrate. By reminding
yourself of the baseline in the exercises below, you can right-size your
listening and become able once again to appreciate quiet sounds – and to
be more sensitive to loud, possibly unhealthy sounds. It’s a little like
eating a sorbet in the middle of a rich meal: your palate is cleansed and
refreshed and your sensitivity is renewed. Silence is your aural sorbet. It
pays to develop a taste for it.
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