The Rare Art of Listening

In a bakery, all the sugary delicacies are placed so we can appreciate them through a display but who is content to just look?  We want to try them, and our palate is preparing us for this because the taste is not appreciated with our eyes. In the same way, listening with our ears makes us receptors of a message, but it takes the heart to carry out this rare art of listening.

Listening with the heart is a necessary skill to build solid relationships; however, we often ignore the importance of listening when we try to communicate.

Listening with the heart is to take off my glasses which make me see reality according to who I am, in order to try to understand it as the other person sees it. It is to open a small door to the inner universe of who is speaking to us and explore the mystery that the other holds, to try to know their experience of being. Understood in this way, listening requires being prepared to accept and appreciate the gift of the other.

It has been difficult for me to assimilate this, and I still struggle to overcome my personal barriers to listening, such as my tendency to suggest solutions and give advice when, for example, my husband confides his worries to me. Other times, I find it hard to listen when our children tell me about their sadness and insecurities. Immediately, the impulse to calm them down and minimize the issue takes over, because as a mother I want to see them happy. It is tragic to recognize my reassuring words have the opposite effect, because far from feeling accepted and welcomed in their moments of weakness, they run into my implicit rejection of their deepest “I”.  It’s as if I were saying to them: “You’re wrong, it’s not that bad, you should not feel that way”. (And how would I know how they feel, if everyone is unique and irreplaceable!).

For this reason, listening with my heart is a difficult act that requires generosity and patience to overcome my own expectations and feelings regarding what I hear. With my glasses on, I am judging if the other is right, if his thinking is correct or logical, or if I agree or disagree with his feeling. His words will enter my ears but will continue to bounce in my head not reaching my heart. Only by setting aside “myself” can I accept the gift of the personal experience of the other, recognizing his experience is as valid and astonishing as mine, although different.

This new effort to listen with my heart has allowed me to know more deeply, and therefore, to appreciate and love better the people around me, starting with my husband and our children. It is amazing how the love we give and the knowledge we gain from the people we love grow when we listen to them with our heart!

If we want to grow in our capacity to love, we must exercise the heart to listen.

Mastering the art of listening requires a lifetime, but even when we are not very good at this (as in my case), the single effort to listen better can improve our relationships considerably, and we become more compassionate people. So let’s start by trying to listen without interrupting, without having the telephone or the television next to us, without hurry, without wanting to fix the life of the other, without judging or wanting to teach.

If we want to grow in our capacity to love, we must exercise the heart to listen. In other words, do not continue to watch the display, dare to taste!