Deep Listening

Dorothée listening in the Vitra Museum

I feel the need to talk to you today about Deep Listening.

A university is often a place of questions and answers, the right answers. We are used to research, talking, writing, passing on knowledge, absorbing knowledge, and reproducing knowledge. One quality that sometimes falls short is deep listening. 

The Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel once said, "The word 'listen' contains the same letters as the word 'silent'."  I want to talk about listening today. How about being silent and just listening. 

The practice of Deep Listening is to just listen to the other person: Without assumptions, without judgments, without wanting to speak my own truth. We all know the opposite of deep listening too well. We all know people (and we probably have to include ourselves, too), who instead of listening to what is being said to them, they only listen to think about what they want to say. 

Deep Listening is the opposite: listening is a silent process to absorb, to learn. 

Such listening requires the temporary suspension of the constant judgment of others and a willingness to receive new information - no matter how it may seem to us. 

To achieve Deep Listening, we must learn to empty ourselves of our preconceptions, again and again, to open ourselves anew, again and again, to receive anew.

With Deep Listening, we engage with things we may not yet understand. And above all, I accept that I too can change, through what I hear.  

Deep Listening can thus create a space of transformation that challenges our own complacency. Deep Listening creates the opposite. Deep Listening creates stress relief and empathy for one another. 

And as Spanish-American anthropologist Angeles Arrien has said about Deep Listening, "I trust the mystery.  I trust what comes in silence and what comes in nature where there's no diversion.  I think the lack of stimulation allows us to hear and experience a deeper river that's constant, still, vibrant, and real.  And the process of deep listening with attention and intention catalyzes and mobilizes exactly what's needed at that time." 

In this sense, I would like to invite us to approach future encounters with a so-called Set-Aside Intention, borrowed from recovery programs, applied for Deep Listening.

I set aside what I think I know about this person, their challenges, this conversation, this encounter so that I can open to the possibilities and truths of this moment.