As you speak with integrity, the depth of integrity in which you can listen also grows. To me, they’re conjoined twins. They really can’t go anywhere without each other. The deeper your ability to be present to someone and to listen, the more you’ll hear. But your hearing won’t be limited to just the words. We all know that people say more than just words. They speak with emotions, intonations, their bodies, and their energy. As you deepen your ability to listen, you’ll begin to hear what’s really being said on multiple levels from the pain in someone’s body to the pain in their heart to the pain of a lost love.
Boundaries to Active Listening Dissolve
When you practice active listening, you create a safe space for someone to simply be themselves. The more of your own issues that you clear from your life, the more you can be with someone in any issue that they may have. Most times, a lot of people won’t listen to someone who is upset because that upset energy activates the pain inside them. They’ve been avoiding their own pain, and anyone else who has a similar pain will re-ignite that issue. So they run away.
You will find as you awaken into this space that more people will want to talk to you, oftentimes about their problems. This is a reflection of the integrity that you’re now working in and the level of awareness that is radiating out from you. It’s a reflection that you are moving from a space of authenticity, and it is part of coming into union with the sacredness and the healing available in life.
Reflective Listening: Beyond Being Active
Coming down the spiritual path and doing the work to know yourself fully gives you more ability to be with someone in whatever pain they’re in. There’s less inside you to get activated by the energy and emotions that are coming out. Deeper still, as your energy body really ignites and your soul is engaged, you start to exude energy. It’s natural. You can’t force it. It’ll happen. From that space, you’ll not only hear and receive, but you’ll reflect their energy back.
I oftentimes talk to people about this “reflective listening.” On one level, we’re all used to talking to someone who isn’t interested in us nor understands what we’re talking about. On another, we know what it is like to talk to someone who doesn’t understand us, but s/he is interested in us. Further along, you’ll get to a point where you talk to someone who is interested, understands, and can reciprocate in the conversation. Reciprocity doesn’t even need to be in words. You know when someone gets it. And when someone understands you on an energy level, there’s a whole other level of reciprocity, and that is, in and of itself, extremely nurturing and healing.
The Power of Presence
For some people, they might call this style of listening the power of presence. Once again, this is another way where multiple levels of our energy system are blending together. The seven levels, which are loosely based on the chakras, start to melt away. The scaffolding of the path starts to get taken down. It is only meant to help you come into yourself and to build a path to that doorway inside you. As your full presence and spirit manifests, a lot of things are no longer necessary, but if they are, that’s okay. Use them as much as you need to.
So while listening at first was simply something of your mind, you realize that as it awakens that you’re listening from your whole body. Everything is open and listens to what someone says. You are finding it much easier to interpret and express this information as well, although you now also have a very deep awareness of how much can’t be expressed in words. So too, you’re understanding the purpose of silence and the purposes of other means of communication such as touch, gentle eye gaze, and energy movement. Your abilities to communicate are magnified and multiplied even as your listening your abilities do the same, and in many ways, it’s because your ability to listen is expanding.
Using the Same Tools, Nothing Special Is Ever Needed
Listening and talking in awakened awareness can still be helped along by many of the tools that I’ve mentioned before. The work gets more subtle. So perhaps, you find yourself doing vocalizations in your own intuitive sound healing. This means that you simply find a tone that feels good to you to sing or chant. You let your voice make whatever sounds it needs to make and fall into the beautiful rhythms of the vocal energy coming from you.
In many ways, you’re morphing the tools into the shapes that you need. Your intuitive awareness and inner guidance has stepped forward. You know what you need to speak your truth and hear the truth in others.
Similarly, you’re going to know where the pain is in yourself and others. It will be easier to talk about now if you’ve been doing the spiritual work. You’ll be able to point to something in another with more compassion and love. You’ll be able to do the same with yourself. Journaling will take on a different tenor. What you wrote about before and focused on will shift as your voice shifts. You may even find yourself channeling some of your inner guidance through your writing as you let go and just let whatever wants to flow come onto the page.
It’s all becoming very, very simple. No retreat or long stay at an ashram is needed as you come more deeply into your awareness, but you’ll also know when you need it. You know what to say and when to listen. As you trust and have even more faith in this, your voice opens up further and whatever you need to say in this lifetime will be available.
Next blog: Awakening the Mind: The Intellect Knows Its Place, Internal Waters Still
2 Comments
Excellent!
Thanks, Betsy for your comment and for your support. 🙂