The Bare-faced Posture of Listening

In his book Seven Thousand Ways to Listen, Mark Nepo asks the reader to “describe the center point of listening. Where is the optimal stance for you from which you can hear both yourself and eternity and your loved ones and the world?”

My center point of listening, my stance for listening, is in a posture of unknowing. This is a place of fully trusting the Spirit to move and speak within me, and it is a place where I set aside my own agenda. I move to this center point by welcoming, wandering, and wondering with others as they share their story. There is no set destination or outcome, but a simple willingness to be a companion, to create safe places for others to explore. This center point has changed, from listening with my head to acquire knowledge, to one of releasing all that I know (or think I know) to the Divine.

To listen is to be silent before the one speaking, silent even in considering how to respond. Listening honors the words or the sounds being heard, and allows words to bear the weight of meaning, deeper meaning even than the façade of the words may carry. Listening is an opening in the soul to fully receive what is offered, whether the soothing song of the turtle dove, or the blast of the fire engine siren. Listening welcomes the expression of the speaker, giving it space to find its fullness of being.

Listening also allows what is spoken from the soul of the speaker to weave its thread into the fiber of my being, to hold it as sacred story. And in the end to consider how such story becomes a part of the collective strands of wisdom to weave into my own story. True listening is a vulnerable, bare-faced posture committed to trust.

How do you listen? How would you describe your center of listening? What do you need to listen well to yourself, to God, to others?