LEND ME YOUR EARS<\/p>\n
\u201cFriends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,\u201d so said
Marc Antony. People want to be heard, but we don’t always do a good job of\u00a0listening. When you have a conversation with someone, are you deciding what to\u00a0say next while they’re still talking or are you actually listening? Listening\u00a0can circumvent misunderstandings before they happen, but so few of us listen\u00a0before we speak. Remember an old game called \u201cTelephone?\u201d A group of people sit
in a row. The first person whispers a sentence into someone\u2019s ear, they whisper\u00a0what they heard into the next person\u2019s ear and on and on until the last person speaks\u00a0the words out loud. Inevitably, what they end up with has little to do with the\u00a0original sentence. It has everything to do with the fact that we don’t really\u00a0listen to each other.<\/p>\n
There are different ways to listen. You can consider each
word and decide what it means. That\u2019s what we usually do. Or you can go a\u00a0little deeper and listen to a person\u2019s tone of voice, phrasing and you can feel\u00a0the energy of the spaces between the words, the subtext, what they truly mean\u00a0above and beyond what they are saying. We do this with infants before they can\u00a0speak and we do this with our pets.<\/p>\n
Being able to speak and make ourselves understood is a gift\u00a0that we often take for granted. A dear friend, Liz, began building her
successful career by savoring the power of words when her mother contracted\u00a0Alzheimer\u2019s and lost her ability to speak. Liz had to discern her mother\u2019s\u00a0needs without the advantage of a conversation. She learned to listen to the\u00a0silences and feel what her mother wanted and needed and now that her mother has\u00a0passed, Liz continues to dedicate herself to understanding the energy and\u00a0deeper meaning inherent in every word we say and hear.<\/p>\n
It can be a challenge to listen. I know someone who never\u00a0takes a breath when she\u2019s speaking and I have to fight to be included in the
conversation. In her case, her words mean very little. It isn’t a conversation.\u00a0It\u2019s a monologue. Her shallow breath and her lack of pauses and silences make\u00a0communicating with her exhausting and I usually don’t bother. \u201cYou’re short on\u00a0ears and long on mouth,\u201d said actor John Wayne. I know a man who constantly interrupts\u00a0me and I\u2019ve learned to say, \u201cI wasn\u2019t finished. Please listen to what I\u2019m
saying.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
When I was studying healing in the Philippines in the\u00a0nineteen eighties, I didn\u2019t speak the native language, Tagalog, or any of the diverse\u00a0dialects, so I did a lot of listening. One evening when we were in a hut at the\u00a0top of a sacred mountain, I heard someone speak in a dialect that was so\u00a0melodious, his words sounded like a song and I drifted off to sleep. The next\u00a0day, one of the women told me with a big smile, \u201cWhen people from his province\u00a0get angry, no one pays attention because it sounds like they\u2019re singing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alfred Brendel, Austrian pianist and poet, says, \u201cThe word\u00a0\u201clisten\u201d contains the same letters as the word, \u201csilent.\u201d John Densmore, drummer\u00a0for the Doors and someone I\u2019m privileged to call a client and a friend, quotes\u00a0holy man, Swami Satchidananda, who opened the Woodstock festival with these\u00a0words:<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd\u00a0if you all join wholeheartedly after the chant, we are going to have at least one whole minute of absolute silence. Not even the cameras will click at that time. And in that silent period, that one minute of silence, you are going to feel the great, great power of that sound and the wonderful peace that it can bring in you and into the whole world.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LEND ME YOUR EARS \u201cFriends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,\u201d so saidMarc Antony. People want to be heard, but we don’t always do a good job of\u00a0listening. When you have a conversation with someone, are you deciding what to\u00a0say next while they’re still talking or are you actually listening? Listening\u00a0can circumvent misunderstandings before they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1905,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1906\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}