Develop your listening skills through nature
Enrich your relationships and awaken to your innate wisdom
The power of listening
Have you ever zoned out mid-conversation? Caught the first sentence, maybe the last few words… and in between, well, who can say?
In those moments I always hope my eyes didn’t glaze over. Sometimes my sharp witted partner might even say, “are you even listening?”
The way we listen impacts directly on the quality of our relationships. With other people, with the more-than-human, and with ourselves.
By learning to listen to others — both human and non-human, we develop the capacity to hear those subtle voices, sensations and intuitions that want to guide us towards our personal truth and meaning.
Listening to understand
Before we strike gold and begin following the subtle guidance of bodily wisdom, we need to be able to listen for understanding.
Listening for understanding is vital for connection.
Carl Rogers, the humanistic psychotherapist, defined ‘listening to understand’ as “the means to see the expressed idea and attitude from the other persons point of view, to sense how it feels to him[/her/they], to achieve his[her/they] frame of reference in regards to the thing he[/she/they] is talking about.” (On Becoming a Human, pp. 331)
What I love about Rogers definition is that it can be applied to a person listening to nature, as much as it can be to a person listening to another person.
His definition helps us understand that empathy, and empathic understanding is at the heart of effective listening.
Listening in Nature: tuning into bird language
Tuning in to bird language is one of the best ways for us to develop our sensory awareness.
Having a sit spot — that one place you return to routinely and regularly in nature — will enable you to develop relationships and familiarity with the wildlife around you.
From your sit spot, you can expand and stretch your hearing out by listening to the birds.
After a while you will be able to differentiate between the species.
As you fine tune your ears, you will begin to hear the different types of calls.
You might wonder,
‘Is the bird singing, alarming, giving a contact call to a companion, showing an aggression, or is it the hungry voices of juveniles begging that I hear?’
When we try to listen to the different voices in nature, and try understanding what each one is saying, we develop threads of connection with the local inhabitants.
After a while we become aware of and track the different patterns, movement and behaviours of our kin.
Listening to Nature’s conversation
When we begin listening for understanding in nature our empathic understanding begins to switch on. It’s not cognitive. It’s a somatic auto-response.
Another thing that happens when we connect to nature and begin listening deeply, is that our racing, overstimulated minds, quieten. It takes a bit of time to develop, but eventually, with consistent and sustained time in nature, the chattering mind quietens down.
When this happens you will experience less internal disturbance. The inner waters will be calmer. This enables you to be present. A key factor in effective listening.
When we are able to be still and listen with our quiet minds and allow our somatic responses to guide us, we begin to meet a deeper conversation — within ourselves and within nature.
Often, nature mirrors exactly what we need to see and meet. If we learn how to speak and share our needs with nature and the more-than-human, often, nature will find a way to meet us where we are and respond. The wilderness will show us what we need to see and understand.
But to recognise the wisdom inherent within nature, we first need to be able to listen to and understand ourselves.
Listening to ourselves
With heightened awareness and a greater capacity for empathic understanding, we develop the necessary competencies and sensitivities to recognise, acknowledge and respond to subtle intuitions, sensations and feelings that offer us innate wisdom that can guide us towards something greater, freer and more fulfilling:
‘our path’, ‘our calling, ‘our personal truth’.
Listening to understand, activates other windows of knowing within us, which conspire with us, so that we can individuate and become the fullest expressions of who we are.
The transformative potential of listening
It’s essential that we sharpen the axe of our listening. And that we do it through nature.
Only when we do this, do we stand a chance of shifting our psycho-spiritual centre of gravity from an ego-centred, anthropocentric way of being in the world, to an Eco-centred way of belonging to the Earth community.
It may seem so simple, but when we learn to listen to others, nature and ourselves we have the potential to transform the world we know.
