As a spiritual discipline, listening enhances our discernment, our awareness of the input we receive on a daily basis.
The Rule of Saint Benedict encourages us to “incline the ears of our heart.” Listening is a spiritual practice that not only strengthens our ability to connect with God, but also connect with others on a deeper, more intimate level. I am a mental health clinician; I spend many hours a week listening. In this conversation, I want to explore active listening, how proper listening skills confronts bias and how to cultivate a “we’ness” in our conversations.
Active Listening
A distinction must be made between hearing and listening. One can hear the words of the Scriptures or the Rule without ever applying them to one’s own life. St. Benedict is not speaking of passive listening, but of an active engagement with the words we read.
In the therapy office, I am often teaching individuals and couples how to actively listen. When we are actively listening, we respond to the person speaking to us with a genuine and realistic response. We are willing to make an effort to meet their needs. Active listening with another person requires a sense of “we ’ness,” the awareness of the other person in the conversation. Conversations only flow when both participants engage in active listening.
In therapy, there is an approach we use called Motivational Interviewing and it comes out of the orientation known as the Transtheoretical Stages of Change. The acronym, OARS can guide us in becoming better active listeners.
As active listeners, we utilize open ended questions, we make affirming statements (When I am late, you feel disrespected, like I don’t care), we make reflective statements (what I hear you saying is … (here you state the observation), then we can summarize what was heard.
Active listening also requires space for silence. I have found that silence can be frightening and have observed my clients afraid of silence. From my experience as a contemplative, learning from contemplatives, silence is important because allows us to be present to God so that one can “hear with the ear of the heart.”
Silence is born of an attentiveness to God’s presence in our lives and puts us at the disposal of the word which will be spoken to our heart. Silence does not only mean silence of the tongue, but likewise silence of the mind and of the emotions.
Confronting Bias
One of the many roles I have played in my therapeutic career was being assigned to cases of young children with behavioral problems. It was my job to try and figure out what behaviors were the problem and why the problem existed. I no longer do this kind of work as I am in a private practice, but the practice of asking why still persists in my professional and personal life. Asking why and maintaining curiosity confronts subjective feelings of bias towards a person or situation.
There are many types of bias.’ Two of which I would like to explore that seem to get in the way of our ability to listen civilly today are recency bias and confirmation bias.
Listening intently means confronting our biases to try and see the whole picture, to hear both sides of the argument or conversation.
Recency bias
We hear it all the time, “kids these days” or in our very worn political mantra of the last few years ago, “make America great again.” Both statements lean into the notion of recency bias. Recency bias is a cognitive bias that favors recent events over historic ones; a memory bias. Recency bias gives “greater importance to the most recent event” The singer, Neil Young said it best:
Old man, look at my life
I’m a lot like you were
Active listening here is listening beyond the bias, seeing the whole picture for what it is, how it is. Any true student of history understands that history repeats itself and while things are better today, it is all relative.
Confirmation bias
“Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes.”
Addressing confirmation bias is a tricky wicket. For me, I try to consume information from various sources and try hard to discern what is fact and fiction. This has become increasingly more difficult as AI generated information has proliferated our different feeds. Active listening as I discussed above, asking open ended questions and reflecting on opposing arguments help us become more constructive and critical with our biases.
Listening to the Inner Voice
Too often in the Christian tradition, we are taught not to trust our instincts and our emotions, to “put it at the feet of Jesus” or worse, told to “trust in God’s will.” I will put a lot of time in with my clients helping to cultivate an improved head heart connection. In therapy speak, we call this “getting back into your body.”
The most simplest practice is to begin with quiet sitting or sitting meditation. Sitting meditation is a much tougher practice than most “gurus” let on and it is the number one reason people tell me that “mindfulness does not work.” I was in my late teens when I was first challenged to sit quietly in morning devotion, challenged to pray the rosary and listen to God. Sitting quietly or running often without headphones and listening to my breath, the birds, or the wind, sitting and moving meditation is often my practice to getting into my body and preparing my mind for the day.
To begin to listen to your inner voice, begin by imagining your heart as a quiet, consistent guide within you. Your head voice often overshadows your heart voice with the noise of irrationality, fear, and societal expectations. To begin then is to learn to tune in to your heart and tune out the noise in your head. Eventually, you will learn to weigh them both and realize as you come to know yourself better that your heart is more authentic and cares less about external successes. In this practice, we learn how to truly express and embody our true self .
The Takeaway
The spiritual practice of active listening is a profound practice. It ties all the elements of leading a contemplative life together. It fosters ongoing curiosity. It involves deeply engaging with another person or with the world around, fostering a connection that transcends the superficial.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In