Isn't strange that we have to talk about listening?

You have two ears that can hear sound, what else do you need to know about listening? It is obviously a skill that naturally comes for any human being. Even deaf people have the possibility of listening.

Most people do not ever reflect on their capacity or incapacity to listen, to truly listen.

Do you feel heard? Do you sense that you are listened to? Probably not...

You have probably developed a survival strategy that protects you from the pain of not having been listened to for a long time. A wall of pretend of clever one-liners, empty smiles and hollow comments... Whether others listen to them or not, it does not matter because it is just pretend. It is not really you talking. If they don't really listening, you will survive...

Listening is maybe not such an insignificant-naturally-given skill as it seems...

Isn't stranger that you never had a class in listening?

Probably not... listening is not high on the skill list needed to become a teacher. You would think as a person in charge of shaping the next generation of human beings, listening would actually be high up there for determining whether a teacher can carry that privilege task.

Why not? Why didn't have class about listening? Why this might be the first time you consider that there is different kinds of listening with each their own skill-set and consequences?

Because listening is a transformational skill.

In modern culture, you are taught to speak.

Speak loud and first and you will be heard. If you don't speak up for yourself, who will?

You are taught that you need to fight to be heard. How long before your Being gives up the fight to be heard by a crowd of non-listener? Not very long. You bury your authentic speaker for lack of listening, until you cannot hear its voice anymore.

By forgetting the skill of listening, we have silenced ourselves to meaningless chatter.

You are taught by example, that the one who can speak (or scream) the loudest is the one who is right. Have you ever been in a meeting that uses this thoughtware? Or in a relationship?

In modern culture, listening has become a weak skill.

What if listening was as powerful, if not more, than speaking?

Listening, authentic listening is not about being a slave of other people's beliefs or rules "Listen to your mother!"

Children do what their parents do, not what their parents say. When a parent says: "Listen to your mother", it is not difficult to guess that the child is not listening to his mother because his father is not listening to her either, and she is not listening to him. Why should the child listen when nobody else is listening to each other in the house?

Or "I am your boss so you should listen carefully."

If you are force to learn to listen under threat, you will listen for what you need to survive.

What do I need to listen to so that I can survive?

You have learn to survival listening, listening for survival purposes. You have learn to listen to the slight change of tone in your dad's (or mom's) voice before they explode for you to get out of the way. You have learn to listen to the teachers hidden implication for when or what the next test will be about. You have learn to listen for what behaviors or words triggers your mom happy so you could please her easily. You have learn to listen to the slightest threat so you would look for what you had done wrong and have an already-made reason when the questionning started. Maybe you learn to listen to the alcoholism in your father or the depression in your mother.

When you were 18 years old, you were ready to shift out of survival listening into listening for Life. Your listening is probably still survival based.

If you learn to listen, you can bring a person to a complete shift without you uttering one word. You can change the direction and purpose of a whole gameworld. If you learn to listen, you have the power to provide a space for things that have never been thought of, spoken of, imagined to come into awareness.

When you think about this, who has the power in a conversation: the listener or the speaker? What can the speaker speak of if the listener is limited suvival based listening? The speaker is therefore limited to survival speaking. What you have is a survival communication.

It is a lot harder for an authentic speaking to be heard from a survival based listening than it is to offer a authentic listening to a survival based speaker for the speaker to change 'channel'.

Do you truly listen to your peers and your loved ones? Probably not... Because why?

Because listening is a transformational experience.

When you truly listen, the result of true listening is that you - as the listener - get transformed as much as the speaker changes. The speaker is heard when you have transformed into the person who could hear something that you could not hear before.

Listening is a two ways transformational road.

Learning true listening might not be as easy as it seems. You have many blocks, fears, conclusions, opinions, thoughtware and prejudices to change and transformation. One of your Box's reaction might be: "Why would I transform so that they can be heard?"

Good question.

Adult Listening is already a powerful tool for extraordinary human communication and connection. However, Adult Listening has its own limitation.

In Adult listening, you repeat back what you have heard people say and you also ask question to make sure that you understand what they are communicating with you.

When you are repeating back or asking questions you are not listening anymore, you are speaking. Asking questions is one of the most powerful ways to direct a conversation in the direction that you want it to go, not the speaker. Trying to understand limits the speaking of the speaker to your own understanding.

Because of these limitations, another kind of Listening was needed as a service: Possibility Listening.

Possibility Listening is the service to become a blank work bench for the speaker to work with. You might have notice that talking to yourself is very different than talking to someone else, even if that person does not say a word. It is because the listener has a consciousness into which your speaking can land and be heard, be completed.

As a Possibility Listener, start by making sure that you have your center, grounding cord and bubble. Then, again with your clicker, declare yourself as a vacuum listening space. A vacuum listening space is a space empty of any of your Box's opinions, conclusions, expectations, assumptions, prejudices, jugdments, needs for understanding, belief systems, rules of appropriateness, etc... You are still there, listening attentively, but there is nothing in the way of your listening, not even your understanding. This means you do not nod, or say "Yes". Both of these automatisms are form of condition to manipulate the other people to keep doing what they are already doing. It is recommended that you something say something neutral like "hmmm" so your speaker know that you are not dead or asleep! You offer zero resistance to the flow of their speaking: no reaction, no nodding, no smiling, no questions, no comments. You are simply being a yes for them, being “there” for them.

What happens in Possibility Listening is that you become a work space for your speaker to unfold their thinking, sensing, feeling into words that do not need to be reasonable or understandable or logical. You can listen to more than you can understand.

The purpose of Possibility Listening is not to become a emotional garbbage can for someone to dump their stories, reaction and emotions on you (whether they are about you or someone or something else).

Possibility Listening is a powerful tool that is not used nearly enough between fellow human beings. Do you remember when you could speak and being interrupted for more than 10 minutes to someone who would just hold space?

Possibility Listening is a service for them.

An ideal moment to use Possibility Listening is to ask a true question to your speaker such as:

• What are you?
• I would really want to hear why this (fill in the gap) is important for you
• Who have you become since we last talk?
• What kind of mage are you?
• "What if you were the President?"
• "What if you knew you would die tomorrow?"
• "What if you won a million Euros?"
• "What would you do differently if all your problems were solved?"

And then, just listening, even if your speaker stops speaking, hold the silence for a while, it will build a tension into your speaker for their next sensed-speaking to come out. The purpose is not to make your speaker uncomfortable, so if needed, you can ask the question again or explain why you need to hear from them.

It is probable that they have never been truly listened to for that long. Neither have you.

What can happen is that listeners often report experiencing an unexpectedly intense compassion for the speaker and empathy with their feelings and desires. Tremendous elegance and respect can be created in relationship through Possibility Listening. We are so accustomed to fighting in order to be heard that many people need practice-time to learn how to speak into and make use of such a profound listening space.

Discovery listening goes along with Discovery Speaking. The listeners in a discovery space are creating the vacuum necessary for the speakers to move into new territories, answer questions that have never been answered (or asked) before, have conversation that have never taken place before.

Discovery Listening differs from Possibility Listening is that Discovery Listening often happen in a bigger group than 2 (which is often the setting for Possibility Listening) and that in a discovery space, Discovery Listeners and Discovery Speakers change roles to become speakers and listeners alternatively.

Entering a Discovery Listening space can feel like a miracle. There is no guarantee that you can create a Discovery space. You cannot organize a Discovery space. A Discovery space emerges out of the confluence these three things:

• of an authentic question to which there is no known answer
• the great necessity and willingness for most people in the space to find out what is on the other side of this question
• the Universe willingness to give away some of its Know How

If you ever enter a Discovery space as a Listener or a Speaker, you might sense this light humming on your physical skin and in your energetic body of the Bright Principles of Discovery and Archetypal Love entering the space.

The model you might be using for 'finding your destiny' is to go hunt for it. Searching radiates a pressure wave that actually pushes things away from you, making them more difficult or almost impossible to receive. On the other hand, sitting back and waiting for things to find you is not co-creative enough for the pleasure of the Universe. Just waiting around passively for 'whatever happens' makes you a victim of circumstances.

Here we are suggesting a third approach, called Universe Listening. Approaching the Universe with a disposition of co-creative listening is a middle way, neither applying pressure nor vacuum, but rather making yourself available to play.

The Universe is trying to encounter you. It is speaking to you about what is wanted and needed from you right here and NOW ongoingly. Are you offering to participatorily encounter what the Universe is ongoingly offering you? Are you inquisitively moving through the world listening for an invitation from the Universe to play with you where you are?

I highly recommend reading A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen to start capturing how much the Universe is talking. It is talking in its own language that most people have silenced from their own perceptions. The silencing of the Universe is one of the consequence of the silencing of our own connection with ourselves.

The inability to listen to the Universe comes from the lack of free attention. Your attention is being mostly capture by advertisements, music, TV, radio, emotional reactions (and therefore Low Drama), inner conversations with people who are not there, problems, identification with your mind's regular chatter, and to-do list(s). You are mostly completely lacking free attention.

The Universe has more or less subtle ways to communicate. I remember one day walking the streets of Bali, when a shop-owner we visited told us on our way out: "Please take care of yourselves". We did not pay more attention to it than a usual goodbye greetings. We walk to the next café, and as we are leaving the waitress says: "Take care of yourselves". For those of you who have not been to Bali, this is not a common farewell statement. It is a compelling story to think that the Universe was talking to us through our fellow human beings.

Universe Listening involves your ability to split your attention and to notice what you notice. For example, if you are walking down the street one way, and the Universe is telling you to walk the other way, you need free 'RAM' space to be able to hear the instructions.

Opening up to the immensely useful resource that is the Universe is allowing input from the Universe that you do not understand and that is not meant to be understood. The other night, after two people left a home of six, a giant moth came and entered our living room. It did not want to go back the way it came. After it seems to want to hang out in the space for a while, it flew through the opposite door from which it had came from.

A whole new relationship to Life as being a indispensable part of the Being can begin as you open up to listen (and why not, maybe be heard) by the Universe.

Your Box and Gremlin have learn to orient what they 'listen for' to serve their own survivalist purposes.

Unconsciously, all day long, you are listening for what will create reactions and emotions that are so familiar they have become your home. You listen for what 'pushes your buttons,' make you angry, make the job impossible, make you feel excluded from the group, make you miserable, make you depressed, make you superior, make you offended and therefore gives you permission to get revenge, and so on.

You might have a particular kind of Box that habitually 'listens for' to push 'positive' - but equally mechanical - buttons that trigger false emotional happiness in you, such as listening for praise, people who also graduated from Yale (or your University/collegue of choice), or have the same hobby as you or love the same things that you do.

Transformational Listening consciously directs your 'listening for' to detect and amplify a particular quality in the speaker the same way a miner sifts through sand to find flakes of pure gold.

For example, you might use Transformational Listening to listen for a person’s commitment, meaning to tune your listening so as to detect what really matters to that person. The moment you detect their commitment you can 'commit to their commitment,' thereby strengthening
your relationship bond with them.

With Transformational Listening, you can listen for Love to detect all the ways the people around love you even if they are incapable of expressing it.

Transformational Listening is a powerful tool to navigate space with individuals or groups. For
example, as a Transformational Listener, you can listen for Possibility: what are the Possibility offered that have not been seen? what Possibility are missing? what is blocking the Possibility from happening?

You can also listen for respect and dignity. Listening for dignity and respect is a creative way to only hear and notice those qualities about a person that make them noble. If you only hear and see what is noble, intelligent and beautiful about a person and ignore the rest soon they will start to notice those same things about themselves.