Finding Ways to Truly Listen

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Hello, everybody. It’s Wednesday and time for another Expanding on expansive weekly tips and teachings.

This week the focus of all my posts are about listening. Listening is so important because there’s so much information coming at us and we also project so much information. It’s such a busy world, the world that we live in, the Western world that it’s hard to be heard to truly be seen to truly be understood. And it’s hard to stop and pay attention to somebody else, but it is an important practice. Something that calms us, it allows us to let go of stress.

And so I want to focus today on how I connect, how I listen and connect to my 94-year-old mother who has dementia and who lives on the other side of the planet. She’s in Sweden and I’m in Northern California. So it’s phone and sometimes Skype. And I want to tell the story within the context of listening and of the context of attentive listening. Which as you might know, is the second key of the four keys that I speak about in my book.

So here’s the book, “Living A Spiritual Life in A Material World Four Keys to Fulfillment and Balance.” And so the second key is attentive listening. And so let me just share about attentive listening a bit. So the first key is expanding presence, right? You want to expand your field of awareness and what happens when you do that, you become aware of information that was not available for you a moment ago when you were more constricted and focused, maybe tunnel vision in your perception and awareness. And so then the second key is attentive listening. And that is not an effort of trying to listen or trying to understand. It’s actually an act of relaxing into a listening, to a broader field of information that has just opened up for you because you expanded your consciousness, you open your heart. And so I want to read from my book and in the bio, there’s links to get my book if you want to read more in-depth the full chapter. It’s chapter five is the chapter on attentive listening.

“Attentive listening requires an open receptive presence to subtle shifts in the endless of information that surrounds us. It is an effortless process whereby you keep your eyes and ears open to synchronistic events and pay attention to variances in your feeling state and thought pattern.”

So for example the posts that I posted on Monday say “Listening is being able to be changed by the other person.” It’s a quote by Alan Alda, and I didn’t know it until a few years ago, he started an entire Institute for communication. Which is so important in our world because we’re so not communicating well with each other, with countries, between different fractions and social groups, and with nature everywhere, we’re not communicating well. And so the quote “Listening is being able to be changed by the other person.”

So you’re not stuck in your opinion, trying to be seen, but you’re actually listening in something in what they say or how they say moves you and changes you. You take something from it and you know, like a soup and there’s an ingredient, an extra spice or an herb, a flavor, and suddenly the soup is richer and you go away with that and you have that with you as you continue your day. And another quote that I posted today says “When we are listened to it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.” So it’s as, as important for us to be listened to as it is for us to listen.

And so when we are listened to, we are seen, we feel that we exist like a baby who wants to be mirrored and seen through the parents or the adult caretaker through their expressions, through their eyes, they feel I’m seen, I exist. Therefore I exist and it unfolds and expands us. And so really listening is about settling into a quiet place. There’s nowhere to go. There’s nothing to say, no agenda. And just listening to more than you were listening to a moment ago.

And so I want to tell you about my mom. So my mom is 94 years old. She has dementia. It’s not Alzheimer’s, but she has severe dementia. She’s 94 years old, so it’s age, but it’s also more than that. And she’s in a memory care unit in Sweden. And I connect with her, you know, every few weeks I will talk to her on the phone or when there was, I mean, we’re still in COVID, but at the time when you were not allowed to visit at all, they had Skype, but usually, we do a phone call. And so it’s very difficult to have a lot of conversation with her because, I can’t really tell her what I’m going through and what I’m doing, because she doesn’t understand what I’m talking about. I can’t tell her about my work it’s too complex for her. But I realized, you know, in this attentive listening to her, and I had visited her two years ago, I can’t visit now because if you don’t have Swedish citizenship you’re not allowed to enter Sweden, so it’s all over the phone. So how can I communicate with her? How can I listen to her? How can we have this bond when we cannot be together? And so I expanded my perception of what dementia is and what dementia is not.

So dementia, you know, is a loss of memory. So it, it affects all your logical thinking, your capacity to conceptualize, to understand. But what my mother doesn’t have is emotional dementia. She doesn’t have tactile dementia. She still appreciates a hug, a kiss, telling her I love her. She doesn’t have emotional dementia, so I can speak with her in a language of beauty and heart and feeling, and it makes her come alive. And so it was this listening to, how can I make connection with my mother that’s going to be meaningful for her, first of all, to enliven her day, but also for me as her daughter to have this bond with her on whatever level is possible? And when you enter this timelessness, it doesn’t really matter because it’s not like, well, it was five seconds. And most of the time I have no connection because that timelessness is everything. There is no time. It’s eternity, that moment is eternal. And so my mom has given me the gift of beauty, the gift of appreciating, paying attention to noticing beauty through poetry, nature, fashion, people. That is the gift that she has given me.

So even if we don’t have the same taste, we don’t have the same coloring in our features and all of that. But the essence of her gift has been the gift of sensitivity to beauty. And so I know that my mother loves poetry. And so on the last call, she was already in bed. It was morning here. It was evening there. She was lying in bed. She was relaxed, but she had the privacy of her own room. And I decided to read two poems for her. And so I picked poems of a poet that she used to love Mary Oliver, but she didn’t remember who Mary Oliver was. And I read the poems. So I read one, I had to explain a bit what it was about.

And then the second one, I had to explain a bit, but then I read it and she loved the second one and was able to repeat the final line of the poem. And she said this is especially beautiful. And she read the final line. And so then I said, poetry opens the heart to which she responded immediately. It opens the heart to the highest degree.

So here I have this moment, my mom has dementia, but when I read poetry to her, she can listen. I’m listening to what is the one doorway that I can come through to have a connection with her. She’s listening to the poem. It awakens in her, her spirit, her soul, her heart, her love of beauty. And she’s able to say something that you have to be kind of logically thinking about, but she didn’t have to. When I said poetry opens the heart and she responds, it opens the heart to the highest degree. Now to use Alan Alda’s quote, this has changed me. We ended up having a conversation. My mom and I for 45 minutes, that’s not easy to have with someone who has dementia on the other side of the planet without video or anything. And it was such a timeless moment that is going to stay with me forever. If I never speak to her again, this moment is alive because it was timeless. It connected to our spirit, to our soul. It touched us. It was a portal into timelessness.

So I am changed by the listening. And I’m changed by the listening to how I can connect with her and see that I can connect to touch. When I visit her through heart, through beauty, I sent her flowers once a week and she doesn’t remember that I send them, but when she gets them, it says hugs Anna, and she sees beautiful spring flowers or whatever is in season. And then it sits on the dining room table in the unit work where she is. And so I found a way to listen to what is going to be a connection what’s going to be uplifting. And the fact is that even though she has dementia, she’s not gone. There’s nothing to do with just functionality, transactional, feed her, dress her, you know, put her to sleep. She’s still able to have this moment of beauty and experience the poem and, and agree with me that it just, it opens the heart to the highest degree.

So that’s what listening does. It makes you be seen. It makes you see somebody else at their essence. It changes you. It takes something with it that you take. The now you can take with you to the rest of your day, the rest of your life. And so I invite you to listen more attentively, expand your heart, become more spaciousness through your breath, opening your heart, relaxing, and then listen to yourself. What do you need right now? What is going to nourish you and satisfy you right now? What is your soul long for? What does your body need? What does your health, what is your financial situation? What does your life purpose need? What does your relationship with a close friend need or with your spouse or with your child or your parent go quiet and listen attentively, and then see if you can be changed and transformed by listening and acknowledge what it feels like to be heard, to be seen, to be listened to deeply.

So I send you blessings of listening, of being listened to, and of listening to everything.  Your heart, trees, the world, what is the deeper need that when you expand and become more spacious in listen, what comes into your mind? What wisdom shows up that you now need to pay attention to and act upon in order to restore more balanced to your life, create more wholeness, Unity, spiritual-material unity, and create true abundance, true spiritual-material abundance in your life?

So once again, blessings of listening to you, for this day, for this week, and I’ll be back next week with another expanding on expansive, weekly tips and teachings. And if you read the description, then you can see in the bio, you will be able to purchase my book, or even there’s a link to get a bonus workbook when you purchase my book. And then you can go to chapter five and read more deeply about attentive listening, have a wonderful day.

Blessings.